Is writing natural?

[zompist]

I can see the parallels, and it does require some level of technology and development over time. However, when exposed to writing systems, even peoples without those previous developments can make writing systems. If a person who had never seen a computer before suddenly found out that some people were using them, they certainly wouldn't be able to replicate even the most basic form of one. I still think that some things can be more natural than others without either being 100% natural or unnatural. Writing is by no means 100% natural but it's more natural than computers.

Any technology is likely to be utterly confusing to those without its socio-technical prerequisities, and adoptable to those who have them.

Say you're a Scythian who happens to get caught in an Assyrian raid around 1000 BCE. You're enslaved, you see this "writing" technology, and later you escape. Do you invent writing for Scythian? Probably not. It's an alien concept and it doesn't meet the needs of your culture. On the other hand, if you're a Hittite, you readily adopt the new technology. (It may be worth a reminder that the first writing systems were extremely difficult to use, and required many years to learn.)

Similarly, the Scythian tribesman wouldn't invent a computer if he could see one. But what about a Soviet technician in 1946? In fact it didn't take long for the Soviets to have their own computer.

All this is pretty tangential to whether writing is "natural", of course, since no one has provided a consensus definition! (If anyone has my Conlanger's Lexipedia, recall the 7-page discussion on meanings of "nature".)

[dɮ the phoneme]

no one has provided a consensus definition!

Peano solved this a century ago. Writing is not natural because it has neither a well-defined successor function nor an obvious 0 element...

[Darren]

Say you're a Scythian who happens to get caught in an Assyrian raid around 1000 BCE. You're enslaved, you see this "writing" technology, and later you escape. Do you invent writing for Scythian? Probably not. It's an alien concept and it doesn't meet the needs of your culture. On the other hand, if you're a Hittite, you readily adopt the new technology. (It may be worth a reminder that the first writing systems were extremely difficult to use, and required many years to learn.)

I'm talking about more recent examples, where there is prolonged contact with a large number of people on both sides. There are obviously some peoples who don't need writing systems or can't make them for whatever reasons. Again I'm not saying that writing is completely 100% natural.

Similarly, the Scythian tribesman wouldn't invent a computer if he could see one. But what about a Soviet technician in 1946? In fact it didn't take long for the Soviets to have their own computer.

Maybe so, but the Soviets were at about the same level of technology, as well as the same type of technology. The Cherokee definitely didn't have technology like the English-writing Americans, but Sequoyah was still able to make a writing system very different to English. I think the reason there aren't more examples like this is that either the native language is completely suppressed or the writing settlers adapt their own alphabet.

[Moose-tache]

Maybe so, but the Soviets were at about the same level of technology, as well as the same type of technology. The Cherokee definitely didn't have technology like the English-writing Americans, but Sequoyah was still able to make a writing system very different to English.

Yes and no. By Sequoyah's birth the Cherokee were intensively farming European crops, living in large permanent villages, and had been trading with the English for a hundred years. By the time Sequoyah created his syllabary there was already a national government of the Cherokee Nation. Zompist's example of the Hittites is probably spot on. I would maybe add late Yayoi Japan and early Taruma on Java. In any case, Sequoyah certainly would have been exposed to writing. Besides being familiar with the concept himself, he lived at a time when educated Cherokee learned to read and write English, like John Ross who would go on to become the next leader of the Cherokee Nation. And a farming society with a fledgling government and intelligentsia is exactly the sort of society that would take advantage of it. The first Cherokee newspaper was established in 1828, probably less than a decade after the invention of the Cherokee syllabary. It's hard to imagine a society going from nothing to newspaper in a decade if they didn't have the right fundamentals to make mass printing a rewarding enterprise.

[Bob]

While writing systems may be artificially constructed, I'd say it is natural for humans to construct writing systems in order to be able to use language without speech.

Natural? This strikes me as an odd question.

According to science, humans have maybe existed 3 million years, many say 100,000 years or so. Writing was invented in 2,500 BC, about then.

Yet, many scientists probably don't believe that.

Writing is probably a function of population growth and or the invention of agriculture and its attendant sedentariness and further human population growth.

Is it natural? Well, I am an amateur scientist with some international reputation. Science is or should be about describing things just as they are and not going beyond that. "Natural for humans" is more of a matter of ideology, or beliefs, or religions, that sort of thing.

I am a scholar of myths or Ancient Paganisms from all over the world but very sensitive to different beliefs.

If I remember after all that reading, I think the Ancient Egyptians say the gods gave writing to men, Long Beaked Bird (Ibis, Thoth) in particular.

And other myths say the gods also gave writing to people. So they say it is not natural to people.

But how should we interpret such things? To what degree do they reflect ancient realities or even wisdom? There is a limit yet to what I can say regarding such things.

But I will add that the ibis is perhaps a swamp bird and that writing was done on paper made of the papyrus reed and using pens made of the same. Another major god, Horus, was also a bird, a falcon. Isis also became a bird at one major junction but I forget what sort. It is also notable that usually it is domesticated animals mostly associated with the gods but perhaps not so for Ancient Egypt. Unless the ibis and falcon were domesticated. And perhaps they were. The domestication of animals is apart of the invention of agriculture. Before it, people were all hunter gatherers in what was once a world-embracing jungle. Now some of us can hardly embrace eachother. So we have today much writing but important things have been forgotten.

And, I have read much, and this is one of the reasons always given by those opposed to writing. That the core of things were already contained in the myths, the oral traditions, and that memory would decay with writing.

The Ancient Egyptians and others are far closer to the origin of humanity than I am. I am very sure of that after decades of study and the learning of many ancient and obscure languages.

Yet the core points of this matter (interpretation), I must leave to others.

...

Are tools natural? Perhaps tools have existed before there were humans. Look it up. But it's the same sort of question as the above.

...

Ask me rather of the mechanics of writing systems.

[masako]

Writing was invented in 2,500 BC, about then.

You're just about a millennium off there, Mr. Scientist.

The earliest examples of Cuneiform from the Uruk IV period date to c. 3350–3200 BCE. It can be debated when does a "pictogram" become an abstract representation of a set of phonemic information rather than just a picture, but the use of these symbols is well documented and indicates a complex writing system in development long before 2500 BCE.



Apologies for my tone, but the rest of your post is just self-congratulatory weirdness and not really helpful,

[Chuma]

I like to define natural behaviour as that which would likely occur without cultural influence, in some hypothetical experiment where a bunch of babies grew up on their own in the wilderness. It's a little hard to test for humans, but I think it works as a starting point. By that definition, it seems pretty clear that writing isn't natural, whereas speech presumably is.

But it fascinates me when things are said to have been invented a few times in different places. The same is said not just for writing but also for example for agriculture. If humans have been around for some million years or so, doesn't it seem odd that several groups would invent writing just a few centuries apart? For some inventions, it makes sense, because there is a prior technology that has recently spread, but I'm not sure what that would be in this case.

[Darren]

I like to define natural behaviour as that which would likely occur without cultural influence, in some hypothetical experiment where a bunch of babies grew up on their own in the wilderness. It's a little hard to test for humans, but I think it works as a starting point. By that definition, it seems pretty clear that writing isn't natural, whereas speech presumably is.

I think the cases where people have grown up without cultural contact they don't learn to speak, making speech unnatural by your definition.

[zompist]

But it fascinates me when things are said to have been invented a few times in different places. The same is said not just for writing but also for example for agriculture. If humans have been around for some million years or so, doesn't it seem odd that several groups would invent writing just a few centuries apart? For some inventions, it makes sense, because there is a prior technology that has recently spread, but I'm not sure what that would be in this case.

Writing is not surprising— when kingdoms get to be of a certain complexity, they need some kind of recordkeeping. If they don't come up with writing, they at least come up with numbers and complex number accounting— i.e. quipus.

But this puts the question back one stage: why did agriculture appear, worldwide, in an evolutionary blink of an eye? In general, we don't know. But some things seem relevant.

The time period may be more restricted than you think. Modern humans (H. sapiens) developed only 200,000 to 300,000 years ago. Before us there were definitely hominins with tools, but perhaps only H. sapiens could develop agriculture.

For most of that time, the planet has been in an ice age. This doesn't mean there was ice in Africa, but on the other hand maybe there was just no good reason for humans to change their lifestyle. So maybe interglacials, when climate changes rapidly, spurred humans to do so as well.

The current interglacial started about 10,000 BCE— about the time humans came up with sedentism, and not long before agriculture.

However, there were earlier interglacials while humans were around: between 130,000 and 115,000 years ago, and between 242,000 and 230,000 years ago. Why didn't humans develop agriculture then? Who knows?

[xxx]

I like to define natural behaviour as that which would likely occur without cultural influence, in some hypothetical experiment where a bunch of babies grew up on their own in the wilderness. It's a little hard to test for humans, but I think it works as a starting point. By that definition, it seems pretty clear that writing isn't natural, whereas speech presumably is.

I think the cases where people have grown up without cultural contact they don't learn to speak, making speech unnatural by your definition.

language is a particularly contagious virus for which human population is a natural reservoir...
writing is a powerful mutation that allows it to be preserved for a long time outside its natural host...